SHCY Award Committee Reports for Works Published in 2019
Table of Contents
1. Annual Article Prizes
1. Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English (2019)
Winner: Kelly Duke Bryant
Report Delivered by Catherine Jones (Chair)
Kelly M. Duke Bryant, "Runaways, Dutiful Daughters, and Brides: Family Strategies of Formerly Enslaved Girls in Senegal, 1895-1911," Women, Gender, and Families of Color 7 (Spring 2019): 37-55
After reviewing and discussing the 22 articles nominated for SHCY's Fass-Sandin prize the committee (Julia Gossard, Kristine Moruzi, and Catherine Jones (chair)) unanimously selected Kelly M. Duke Bryant, "Runaways, Dutiful Daughters, and Brides: Family Strategies of Formerly Enslaved Girls in Senegal, 1895-1911," to receive the prize for best article on the history of children and youth published in English in 2019. The committee found that this thoughtful, nuanced article provided new insight into how formerly enslaved girls in Senegal positioned themselves within (and sometimes against) hierarchies of power in order to create new lives for themselves in the wake of France's 1848 emancipation decree. Working with the limits and silences of the archive, Duke Bryant succeeded in developing an important claim about how attending to the individual experience of girls as historical actors provides new insight into colonial structures and those who built lives within and athwart them. Further, it demonstrates that age played an important part in strategies girls developed to challenge the legacies of slavery.
2. Fass-Sandin Article Prize in Scandinavia (2019)
Winner: Randi Dyblie Nilsen
Report Delivered by Helle Strandgaard Jensen (Chair)
Randi Dyblie Nilsen, "Barneperspektiv - en ressurs i kritisk samfunnsvitenskap?" Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk volum 5 (2019): 77-95.
The prize committee has chosen Randi Dyblie Nilsen for the Fass-Sandin Prize 2019 for her article “Barneperspektiv – en ressurs i kritisk samfundsvidenskab” [Child Perspective. A Critical Ressource in Social Science?]. The article is a historiographical analysis highlighting the origin and development of the concept of ‘child perspective’ in the social sciences in Norway, 1969 to 1990. The article investigates what insights the concept has yielded and the views of children it has produced. The committee was particularly impressed by the way in which the article shows how the early use and later application of the concept in a Norwegian context, compared with its later used in the Anglosphere, stem from interdisciplinary research focused on relationships between parents and their children, agency, and gender.
The prize committee would like to give an honourable mention to Ning de Coninck-Smith for her article “Transnationale arkitektoniske kulturmøder” [Transnational architectural encounters]. The article is a richly contextualized, very well-crafted narrative about the Asian Regional Institute for School Building Research, focusing on knowledge production and the materiality of cultural encounters. The committee was impressed by the through and fruitful application of Barad’s ‘new materialism’ which Coninck-Smith has used very effectively to bring materiality to the fore in a history of transnational knowledge production.
2. Book Prize
1. Grace Abbott Book Prize (2019)
Winner: Rebecca Swartz
Report delivered by Stephanie Olsen (Chair), Nick Syrett, and Shurlee Swain.
After reading 17 strong books nominated for the Grace Abbott Prize, the committee is pleased to announce the winner:
Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833-1880 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833-1880 is a tour de force and an impressive template for how to do a multi-sited history where childhood is central to questions of imperial, political and educational history. Drawing on detailed archival research relating to the education of Indigenous children in a range of British settler colonies, Rebecca Swartz offers convincing new insights into the centrality of childhood to shifting ideas around race and indigeneity in the British imperial project. Disrupting the metropole/periphery dichotomy she brilliantly shows how the attitudes of settlers shifted, adapted and contested policies developed in the centre to secure the new racial hierarchies they were seeking to construct in taking control over the land and its peoples.
Honourable Mention:
Mary Hatfield’s Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland is a deeply researched and elegantly written account of middle-class childhood in Ireland. Paying particular attention to the role of Protestantism and Catholicism in notions of childhood, as well as the gendered ways that female and male children and youth experienced education, Hatfield’s account takes us beyond the rhetoric of the growing value placed on childhood during this period to show how children themselves experienced it, and how their experiences were shaped by privilege and by prejudice.